<bt>Mongolia is a country where the sharp arc of the sky presses the world into hard, horizontal planes. The land runs dizzyingly wide and clear to the lip of the horizon. I live in far western Mongolia, where the semi-desert sweep is broken sharply in sudden juts of red, craggy mountain. The north is given over to Siberian taiga, but in other parts of the country, the Gobi Desert and the Central Asian steppe claim the horizon completely. Whatever the geography, Mongolia is the kind of place where one is immediately and personally aware of the weight of sheer open space.
Most people couple Mongolia with the image of Chinggis Khaan [Gengis Kahn] and the largest continuous empire that the world has ever seen. The average Westerner loses track of the Mongols somewhat after that. The country mainly revolves around raising animals. About half of the population — the total population is a bit over two million in a territory twice the size of Texas — is nomadic, carefully tending the all-important "big five" of sheep, goat, cow, horse and camel. The other half of the population lives in one of the country's three urban centers.
My relationship with Mongolia began in June. Summer, the season in which you place wet towels on your head before venturing out to be baked like so much butter in the steady glare of the Mongolian sun. Temperatures easily reach 110 degrees Fahrenheit. No trees, at least not where I live. Plenty of small, trotting goats, though. More activity than you think in a place of 2,000 inhabitants. Horses and jeeps race through, depositing dusty men in their high boots and long dress-like dels, who buy their cigarettes in the one-room shops and then squat outside, chatting with their friends.
Ubiquitous are the dented and rusty motorcycles with the sidecars, which serve as popular taxis. The old women wear head scarves, and the young women wear tight pants, boots with narrow heels and the requisite bright lipstick. The children are always pegged with water duty. You can see them constantly en route to the pump with a pole over their shoulders and a water canister hooked on either end. Now that it's winter and the pumps are dismantled, the children have to truck the longer distance to the river.
MONGOLIANS are very proud of their hospitality, and it is inviolate. Should you find yourself visiting, you will be ladled bowl after bowl of salty milk-tea, poured from a giant thermos or ladled straight from the giant wok on the stove, and you will be firmly encouraged to overindulge on fried bread. If there is any food prepared (i.e., the meat), you will be offered that, as well. Mongolian food revolves around meat: meat alone, meat and noodles, meat with carrots and potatoes, meat soup, meat dumplings. Guests sit to the far north of the ger — a burdensome honor, as it is the farthest point from the door and thus makes unobtrusive trips to the outhouse impossible.
Outside of the public buildings — which consist of a 10-year school, one-room post office, a cracked concrete government building, a broken bath house and the like — my soum [a small town] is lined out in eight, straight dirt roads.
Wandering down one, you pass rows of successive housing compounds [haashas] on either side. Borders are delineated by fences of wood boards, tin siding, mud bricks or dry stonewalls. Family security is efficiently maintained by fierce haasha dogs that avidly patrol their territory when not out loose on the streets.
Families live in one- or two-roomed buildings, often splitting rooms among several families in a single building. More commonly where I live, a family will live together in a single ger [nomadic tent.] The fact that I live in a ger all to myself still occasionally blows my neighbors' minds. All that space — it's about 10 feet by 10 feet — to one person. I have no adequate explanation to offer them.
THE MONGOLIAN GER is round, built without nails and covered in felt. Gers are pretty amazing. They can be set up or pulled down in a couple of hours and are fully collapsible for easy transport via camel, horse or truck. In the summer, you roll up the felt sides, and cool cross breezes come from all sides and in through the hole [toon] in the top. In the winter, at temperatures sometimes as low as -30 F, only 2 inches of felt and the heat generated by your stove separate your from the elements. It's a system well-tested through thousands of years of use.
Gers also come with some strange chores, such as having to climb up on the top after a snowfall to sweep, or hauling the stove pipe outside and rolling it around with stones inside to clear out the ash.
Summertime floors are either dirt or cardboard-covered carpet; winter necessitates a hard packing of dirt underneath wood planks. Furniture rings the curve of the walls, and the stove is dead center. We burn cow dung, wood, coal or wooden brushy plants, depending on the season and part of the country.
I am "the English teacher" in my soum. This title occasionally gives rise to a certain confusion as to whether I am a teacher from England, or an American teacher teaching English. I roam from classroom to whitewashed classroom, my students leap — more or less — to their feet to greet me respectfully. They enthusiastically report that they "are good," "are terrific" or “are lousy," or they just stare out the window, already bored.
Students address all teachers by their first names and the suffix "bagsh" [teacher.] When I am not teaching, I come across them playing cars in their classrooms; sweeping; mopping; cleaning the floor, blackboard and desks; earnestly dragging their friends around corners to tell secrets; and lugging pails of water from the river to stock the school's boiler.
Sometimes, as I am wandering up from my dirt ger-wards, I think of my home in America. My mind drifts over the odd things I associate with suburbia — thick, floor-to-floor carpeting; the smooth green lawn outside; the mailbox at the end of my black asphalt pipestem. But then my daily gauntlet interrupts my thoughts. A few play-besmudged children, small and budding anglophiles, always standing on their roofs, enthusiastically jumping up and down and shouting "Angie bagsh, Angie bagsh, hello, hello, HELLO!!" And the strange womanly scream of a shaggy, brown bearded camel, harried by its rider, is heard, out as it ambles slowly by — and I am quietly content in my new scenery.
Angie Braun has spent the last nine months serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mongolia. Her family resides in Burke. She is a graduate of both Robinson Secondary School and the College of William and Mary.